Last updated on 2017-09-21
Striking while the iron is hot, Bo Sistak of Rapid City announces his candidacy for District 35 House. The former Airman moved to Rapid City fifteen years ago after finishing his service at Ellsworth Air Force Base. On LinkedIn, Sistak says he is an electrician now working as a fire alarms technician for Sallyport Global*, a defense contractor on whose board Trump Homeland Security nominee and now chief of staff John Kelly served and which is involved in a human-trafficking scandal in Iraq. (Lynne, I know you’re having a tough day; consider that line a get-well card.)
And in terms of really striking while the iron is hot, Sistak already has set up his ActBlue page to accept donations online. That he’s raising money on ActBlue means that he’s a Democrat.
Sistak doesn’t mention his party affiliation in his announcement, but he hits some proper progressive notes about the need to raise South Dakota’s workforce-repelling lowest wages in the nation and protecting South Dakota’s natural treasures for generations to come. He speaks of protecting services for veterans and protecting health care and the insurance exchange (if it survives the Cassidy-Graham chain saw) for all South Dakotans.
Sistak concludes with a call to morality—and just as context demands that we read current District 35 Representative Lynne DiSanto’s “All Lives Spllatter” post as an insult to the Charlottesville protestors attacked by a car driver, the context of the past day’s news demands that we read this passage as a direct attack on DiSanto’s failure of judgment:
Folks, I want to represent you not only to make change, but to bring the dignity and character back to Pierre that South Dakota’s constituents deserve in an elected official. I want to give you a voice that we can all be proud of. I want to continue being your friend and neighbor, and to have a relationship with each and every constituent in my district. I want to be a legislator that you can call, write, email, or just have a cup of coffee with to ensure that I am hearing from you first-hand. And with these relationships, I hope that I will be so privileged as to earn your trust. I want each and every one of you to know that I will work tirelessly for you, whether we agree on every issue or not.
To make this happen, I need your support. In 2018, I’m asking you to vote for me for District 35 House, and together we can make South Dakota shine once more [Bo Sistak, Facebook post, 2017.09.20].
Make South Dakota Shine Once More—that’s how we Democrats translate Trump’s successful campaign slogan, right?
Update 2017.09.21 05:10 CDT: Candidate Sistak checks in below to update his employment status: he worked for Sallyport in Qatar for nine months back in 2012 but has been at Furniture Row (on Eglin, out by Sam’s Club) in Rapid City for the last five years. Sistak’s active and updated LinkedIn profile is here.
Hey Lynn, honey. see @:28 for the dead persons red shoe bouncing out of the dented grill of your challenger buddy’s hot car. hot car, hot chick, hot rhetoric, eh? Dems will make effort to make sure you will never hold a public office again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeB2ZaUSa48
All lives spattered or something? Pathetic human being. Pathetic republican.
Welcome, Bo Sistak. Send me a message and I’ll get you a list of every backstabbing, two faced low life who’ll be tracking your every word, laying political land mines in your path and lying over and over, just to keep what you believe is best for SoDak silenced.
Via con Dios, amigo.
Mr. Lansing, please don’t give this Sistak fellow my information. Please? I think that young DiSanto female is insaner than most, with a disproportionately sized body for her face. I expect there is surgery like those Kardashian girls going on there. I’m just sayin…
Anybody named “Bo Sistak” probably gets a bunch of votes on the name alone. Plus, he’s on the twitter.
https://twitter.com/therealsleestak
Har-dee-har. The real Bougain Sistak (put them name on your ballot and smoke the opposition!) is on Twitter here:
https://twitter.com/bosistakfor35
The only people who think the meme was a reference to the incident in Charlottesville are the ones who looked at an artist’s rendering of an SUV, possibly a Jeep Liberty, and thought it looked like a Dodge Challenger.
There are very few people who cannot tell the difference between a Liberty and a Challenger, and even fewer who would admit such ignorance, but if you want to go there you need to surrender your man card now and start your gender transition ASAP. Because you’re going to feel so good wearing high heels.
What the heck is Anne Beal talking about? A crowd of protesters gets splattered by a vehicle in Virginia and a meme is talking about splattering protesters with a vehicle and they have no similarities? And on top of that, it’s a play on words of the racist slogan, All Lives Matter. C’mon, Annie. You’d defend a child molester if he was a Republican.
Yaah, Anne, those stick figures probably don’t represent people getting run over and killed for no good reason either. One looks like she’s just riding on top of the car for fun or could she be a model supporting an ad campaign for a new vehicle? Another guy is just out for a run it looks like, probably on a sunny day. He just happens to be in front of the vehicle. He doesn’t even look that scared. The stick figure behind the vehicle is clearly just trying to catch their Uber.
Thank you for helping to explain how a stick figure vehicle is clearly not a reference to the murder in Charlottesville. The people that I saw get run over on TV did not look anything like the stick people on Disanto’s meme. For one thing, the people in Disanto’s meme are all white. This is clearly not the same people, nor the same vehicle. *******************************************
To clarify the employment history there. I was a contractor for the USAF on a base in Qatar in 2012 which happened to be Sallyport/URS at the time. I inspected fire alarms. I have been an employee of Furniture Row for almost 5 years now.
My team has been working behind the scenes for months now anticipating our announcement in the early spring. Yesterday’s incident was a call to action and we decided to move to our next phase. I hope you all can hear me out and work together to fix our legislature.
Same as Porter, what the heck is Anne talking about – man cards and transition changes with high heels? What on earth?
Anne has really gone off the deep end and is now officially insaner than most.
Has the big red canoe 🛶 sprung a leak? It’s been crazy talk from the majority ever since DiSanto went off the rails. Republicans need a few years away from the stress of leadership. LOL
Anne Beal ~ “What part of a warning that people shouldn’t play in traffic should anybody be enraged about?
I think “all lives splatter” is a good title for a bill banning bicycles from the Interstates, and from highways with speed limits greater than 50.”
Troy Jones ~ “Think about it her (DiSanto) only real defender out of 50 posts between these two threads is Anne Beal (and she has done a good job defending her).”
The fact that a House candidate already has a campaign team should make opponents nervous.
Thanks for the job update, Bo! I thought those looked like mattresses in the background of your picture. But now DiSanto won’t be able to make nearly as much hay of the Sallyport connection as I thought she might. Alas! ;-)
Indeed, strange that Anne would consider womanliness an inferior status.
Darin properly destroys the core of Anne’s attempt to save DiSanto with art analysis. If I had to add anything, I’d suggest that the stick-y rendition of the vehicle as an SUV could be read as testosteronal over-compensation, amping up the male rage and menace with an even bigger vehicle that the Charlottesville driver’s weapon of choice.
But Anne, why keep trying to manufacture excuses when DiSanto herself has joined Qualm in acknowledging that posting that image was inappropriate?
The point here is that through her thoughtless online behavior, DiSanto has committed an unforced error, drawing nationwide negative press to herself and her state and drawing a challenger in a district where Democrats have usually kept their heads down and where last time the Republican House incumbents beat the Democrats two to one.
Mr. Sistak,
Love Furniture Row, your NASCAR Team, Martin Truex and Eric Jones. Have followed the team every race since their humble beginnings. Hope your political career experiences the same meteoric success, Bo. Welcome to the arena!!
Blood in the Water! Blood in the Water! Blood in the Water!
Ms Beal’s whomper-jawed explanation is based on the January 1986 Challenger model – Obviously a major malfunction.
I agree with you Anne Beal. Everybody knows that Ms. Hix hyphen Disanto was really giving the green light to running down abortion protesters at Planned Parenthood. You can tell by the dress and the hair bow that the woman getting run down is a pentacostal holy roller. And Jeep Wranglers (not Libery – Wrangler) are notorious left-wing hippie vehicles. Even Bernie Hunhoff drives one. This says to me that Ms. Hix hyphen Disanto is really a closet liberal who is trying too hard to look like a conservative to get herself elected. When she advocates running down abortion protesters and gets you to defend her the joke is on you.
http://juanitajean.com/keep-it-classy-republicans/
Word gets around…….
Crooks and liars has picked up on the wingnut whirlwind.
http://crooksandliars.com/2017/09/all-lives-splatter-goes-nationwide-gopers
Oh,man this should be fun.
mfi, Salon’s Charlie May also did a story on DiSanto’s post:
https://www.salon.com/2017/09/20/south-dakota-republican-posts-meme-supporting-running-over-protesters/
Thanks Bear. :)
In the interest of full disclosure myyoungest brother-a twin- was savagely run over a half block from home by the head of the Cherokee, iowa Civil Defense, a block away from the hospital and that same block from his own home.
Rick was 7. The perpwas never arrested for speeding or reckless driving. He wasn’t even ticketed. The official police report blamed the victim for not crossing the street st s designated cross walk. Of course there weren’t any on that street. There sure as hell is now. RIP little Brother 2/18/1972.
DiSanto tried to explain her thought process behind this mean meme:
“I am sorry if people took offense to it and perceived my message in any way insinuating support or condoning people being hit by cars,” she said, according to the Rapid City Journal. “I perceived it differently. I perceived it as encouraging people to stay out of the street.”
I perceived it as encouraging people to stay out of DiSanto’s way or she would run them over and splatter them, but that’s just me and my wild imagination.
mfi, that is a tragic story. So sorry for your loss.
Sorry, Mike. :(
Thanks guys, I appreciate the sentiments.
Mfi, its sounds kinda like Janklow’s plowing down a biker because he was in a hurry and ran a stop sign outside of sioux falls. yu’d think republicans would wake up but I guess they don’t need to in SD.
this lack of morals on the part of republican leadership in SD is replete. The Regents, EB5 and MCEC debacles are just more examples. This Di Santo chick gets elected after her hubby was elected to RC city council, I believe. (I don’t pay much attention to republican details). Meanwhile that same city council refused to put a dem in the president of the council position, despite years and years of relevant experience. typical. http://northernbeacon.blogspot.com/2017/09/regents-and-undermining-of-education.html
Dems, btw, who are we running for AG? An unknown LaFluer character seems to be for the republicans, who may just take us back a hundred years.
Ann beal, meet old sarge, he seems as big of a fool as you are. fer Christ sake, its a jeep and not a challenger. gawd
sarge, in case u forgot, that is a human foot or shoe falling out of the grill of the challenger “jeep” as it backs up, full speed, after ramming 20 people full speed. kind of like an IED. google it.
some other idiot republican said that a hot car just gets you excited. “the car made me do it”. blood in the water–u shame every combat vet I know.
Welcome Bo!!
btw, aren’t republican ND law enforcement and legislators interesting in legislating a defense to running down protesters, like up at Cannon Ball? Didn’t SD legislators try to support a similar action?
Ditto, Mike. Sad darn story.
Darin says, “DiSanto tried to explain her thought process—” but hold on: one cannot explain something that did not exist. Her repost had the same minimal level of thought behind it as 95% of everything else people repost. Retweets are intellectual impulse buys, the scratching of an itch, and a pretty good register of what’s in the retweeter’s gut. Her “explanation” sounds like the boyfriend who, called out by his girlfriend for staring at another woman’s hips, says he was just trying to read the designer label so he could buy a similar dress for his girlfriend.
Leslie, we don’t have a Dem for AG yet. Keep an eye out for young, enthusiastic lawyers! The GOP has four—Ravncborg, McGuigan, Fitzgerald, and Russell; LaFleur is competing with Lora Hubbel for last place in the gubernatorial primary.
Ms. leslie, you are right about the heinous board of regents and the scams they ran under the fists of Mr. Jewett. Even that nice young lady Ms. Johnson could not stop it all, but it is now a kinder, gentler board.
It’s a pointless and unrealistic argument to point out that DiSanto’s shared meme gravitated to nationwide scorn and should subtract from her future as a political figure in South Dakota. Too soon we forget that Phil Jensen (and several other GOP poster children) has been equally, if perhaps more reprehensible in deed and remarks over the course of several years in the legislature and his constituents continue to re-elect him to serve in the legislature- irrespective of the fact that he gets nothing done and has accomplished nothing of importance in the legislature. There is little difference in socio-political acumen between constituents in DiSanto’s district and those in Jensens. If history is assurance, there is little hope in overcoming the rank smell of bigoted, self righteousness that elects these people. The delusion is seemingly incurable.
Anne, never mind the distraction on what type of vehicle it was. There were words there, too, in the meme that DiSanto posted. Words like “All Lives Spatter”. The vehicle type is irrelevant, but the words definitely cut one way.
John W., I share some of your pessimism. Most of the people paying attention to South Dakota’s embarrassments in the national press don’t vote in the Dirty Thirties districts of the South Dakota Legislature. The DiSanto/Jensen base will wear national disgrace as a badge of honor, let it reinforce their bunker mentality against “coastal elites” and anyone else with an opinion from more than 200 miles away, and keep voting for their soothing yahoos.
But at least this time, we’re seeing local folks—an employer and a domestic abuse response group—hold DiSanto accountable with visible consequences. Those consequences don’t mean DiSanto will lose her next election, but they signal that there are more people who might take such transgressions by DiSanto and other elected Republicans seriously.
Excuse me, the word was “Splatter”. Disgusting, and beneath anyone who has the intelligence or humanity to be a legislator. (Even if, in SD, intelligence isn’t a requirement for legislature.)
Thank you, Robin, for recognizing Anne’s distraction from the main moral problem in DiSanto’s posting.